ELAR Concerns and Gold Standard Solutions

This summer, I worked with a group of teachers in a one hour ELAR Think Tank. We generated questions and discussed how to resolve them. As a follow up, I gathered one gold standard resource that related to our concerns. Here's what I sent them. 

Happy Almost September,

By now, most of you are deep into lesson plans and learning about your students. And I’m just now digging out of being on the road for beginning of the year staff development. I’ve returned to my messy desk to remember our work this month and follow up on your ideas and our short time in the “Think Tank.” Here are some resources to further your work and growth. I’ve tried to think of one, gold standard resource to support your inquiry.

Motivating and Encouraging Readers:

Book Love by Penny Kittle

Motivating and Encouraging Writers: 

Choice in writing and the development of idea fluency is key. Here's a link to my writing notebook. Linda Reif's Quickwrite Handbook is a must. 

Mindset for School: 

Bright Minds, Poor Grades by Michael D. Whitley, PhD, has been extremely helpful to me. Here’s a review of the content.  Here’s a link to the book.

Going Beyond the Surface in Reading:

Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Bob Probst

Fluency in Relationship to the New TEKS:

Timothy Rasinski is the gold standard in Fluency right now. Here’s a website chock full of resources. In terms of the new TEKS, what you need to remember is that it’s about more than rate. We need to remember fluency is a tool we use and adjust to monitory and create comprehension. It includes rate, accuracy, prosody, in light of the genre characteristics and reading purpose. We also need to be thinking about fluency in terms of what it means to listen fluently to others and various media, write (handwrite and type) quickly and accurately, and how we can think fluently. Fluency is about more than reading.

Editing:

Grammar Keepers 101 by Gretchen Bernabei. I’ll be offering a session that goes deeper into Revising and Editing on September 26^th . Session one on Prewriting and Writing is on September 20^th. And I can’t help it. One More. You have to look at Jeff Anderson’s stuff if you haven’t seen it.

Combining Sentences:

The gold standard on this is Killgallon and Noden.

Grading:

Papers, Paper, Papers by Carol Jago . Here’s a session and resources based on her book and other thinkers. Believe it or not, my best advice about grading is to stop doing it. 😊

Still Thinking:

The idea of expression (speech) vs reading (mental). Very interesting.

Still Writing:

I write about things like our session here: https://roseshona.blogspot.com/

Loved thinking with you all! Hope to see you again and soon. Enjoy your year.

Your Fan,

Shona Rose